1. For definitions of peasant society, see Daniel Thorner, “Peasantry,” in David Sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 11:508; Teodor Shanin, “Peasantry: Delineation of a Sociological Concept and a Field of Study,” European Journal of Sociology 12 (1971): 289–300; and Sidney Mintz, “A Note on the Definition of Peasants,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1 (1973): 91–106. Also useful are the historiographical discussion in David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 3–14, and the contradictions of community and class inherent in peasant society noted by Victor V. Magagna, Communities of Grain: Rural Rebellion in Comparative Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 2–21.

2. Richard B. Barnett, “Images of India from Alexander to Attenborough,” Jefferson Society lecture, University of Virginia, 16 September 1983.

3. For an introduction to the complexity of Hindu monasticism, see G. S. Ghurye, Indian Sadhus (1953; 2d ed., Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1964); and Parshuram Chaturvedi, Uttari Bharat ki Sant-Parampara [The North Indian Sant Tradition], 3d ed. (Allahabad: Leader Press, 1972).

4. All three monastic lifestyles—itineracy, spiritual study, and soldiering—can be contained within one order; see Peter van der Veer, Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre (London: Althone, 1988).

5. An important study in this field is Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

6. Hence, implicit to this study are questions not unlike those that concerned A. Appadurai in Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 6–7: What are the relationships between the religious, the political, the economic, and the social in colonial India? What underpins hierarchy in the social order? And how do we define and measure change in the caste system?

7. See, for example, János M. Bak and Gerhard Beneke, eds., Religion and Rural Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

8. The role of Saya San (1930s) in lower Burma and Swami Sahajanand Saraswati (1920s to 1940s) in north India are but two examples; on the former, see James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); on the latter, see Walter Hauser, The Politics of Peasant Activism in Twentieth-Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and Hauser, ed., Sahajanand on Agricultural Labor and the Rural Poor (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994).

9. Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 105–6.

10. Hence this history should be understood as an important part of the process of ideological change described by Peter van der Veer in Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

11. The material for such an inquiry must be based largely on vernacular sources that reflect the conscious ideologies of peasants and monks and reveal the unconscious discourses in which they participate. In saying this, however, I do not wish to suggest that vernacular sources are somehow more “authentic” than official or nonofficial (i.e., nationalist) English-language sources; both must be approached with the utmost caution so as to “distinguish what they describe from what they attempt to explain” (Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989], 16). In English-language documents this entails peeling away the layers of colonial or nationalist apprehensions; vernacular sources may also contain some of these apprehensions, but with a strong overlay of religious and social polemic.

12. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), particularly chapters 3 and 4.

13. See Lewis Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), for an engaging venture into the psychohistorical and literary dimensions of this idealization.

14. Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–22,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 3 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1–61.

15. Government of Bihar and Orissa (GOBO), Political Department, Special Section, file no. 80 of 1921, “Report of Sadhus taking part in non-cooperation,” part 2, 3, Bihar State Archives, Patna. The observer was Krishna Ram Bhatt, an employee of the Tata Iron and Steel Company at Jamshedpur in Bihar; his observations are taken from paragraph 73 of the Bihar and Orissa Police Abstract of Intelligence in the above-mentioned file. See the following chapter for a discussion of soldier monasticism.

16. GOBO, Political Department, Special Section, file no. 80 of 1921, part 2, 3. One crore, or kror, is equal to ten million; hence Bhatt is referring to the entire population of India.

17. GOBO, Index to the Proceedings of the Political Department, Special Section, in the Bihar State Archives, indicates numerous reports compiled on the subject of “political sadhus,” especially between the years 1920–35, when Gandhi dictated the terms of Indian politics. As I note below, this represented a renewed interest in the politics of monasticism on the part of colonial officials.

18. Anandamatha, trans. Basanta Koomar Roy (1941; reprint, New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1992); Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 44. Anandamatha was originally published in 1882 in Bangadarshan, Bankim’s literary monthly, and subsequently translated into English as The Abbey of Bliss by Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta (Calcutta: M. Neogi, 1906). On the circumstances of Bankim’s authorship, see Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 117 and passim.

19. See the reflections of van der Veer, Religious Nationalism, on the constituent elements of nation implicit to the Indian context.

20. See Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. 23–65, “The Colonial Construction of the Indian Past.”

21. Romila Thapar, “Interpretations of Ancient Indian History,” History and Theory 7, no. 3 (1968): 318–35; and “Religion, Communalism, and the Interpretation of Indian History,” public lecture, Wesleyan University, 18 November 1992. See also K. N. Panikkar, “A Historical Overview,” in S. Gopal, ed., Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babari Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi Issue (New Delhi: Penguin, 1990), 22–37.

22. Sleeman, A Report on the System of Megpunnaism or, The Murder of Indigent Parents for their Young Children (who are sold as Slaves) as it prevails in the Delhi Territories, and the Native States of Rajpootana, Ulwar, and Bhurtpore (Calcutta: Serampore, 1839), 11.

23. This recommendation was not acted upon by the government. Sleeman’s opinions were part of the ever-widening scope of colonial police power in the early nineteenth century, and the bandits and thugs that he sought to supress were holdovers of institutionalized violence from an era when the reach of the state was not nearly so total. See Stewart Gordon, “Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State-Formation in Eighteenth-Century Malwa,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 6, no. 4 (1969): 403–29.

24. See Disraeli’s speech to Parliament, 27 July 1857, partially reproduced in Ainslee T. Embree, ed., 1857 in India: Mutiny or War of Independence? (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1963), 11–12.

25. Freitag, Collective Action and Community, 161–62. Note in particular the activities of Sriman Swami and Khaki Baba (also known as Khaki Das).

26. Saiyyid Muhammad Tassaduq Hussain, Kitab-i Sadhu [The Book of Sadhus] (Sadhaura, Umballa District: n.p., 1913). The author is described as “Head Constable, Saharanpur Police Lines”; the book is dedicated to P. B. Bramley, then Deputy Inspector General of Police, and on p. 5 it is noted that the work was sanctioned by Government Order no. 3232 of 1913.

27. These individuals were described in history sheets sent from R. S. F. Macrae, of the Bihar police, to E. L. L. Howard, chief secretary to the Government of Bihar and Orissa, 3 November 1921, and included as appendices in GOBO, Political Department, Special Section, file no. 80 of 1921, part 2, 8–20.

28. See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 106–8, on the postcolonial historiography of rebellion and the unfortunate tendency of the historian’s voice “to merge with that of the local sub-divisional officer as he speaks of the ‘bad characters’ and ‘the criminal sections’” (107).

29. See C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and John R. McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), part 4.

30. Walter Hauser, “Swami Sahajanand and the Politics of Social Reform,” presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, D.C., 4 April 1992. Hauser quotes Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s autobiography, Mera Jivan Sangharsh [My Life Struggle] (Bihta, Patna: Shri Sitaram Ashram, 1952), 185 and (on Saraswati’s relations with Gandhi more generally) 212–13. Hauser’s essay is forthcoming in the Indian Historical Review 18, no. 2 (January 1992), which is now over two years behind schedule; I am grateful to the author for allowing me to cite the original.

31. On this historiographic problem, see Freitag, Collective Action and Community, 8–12.

32. Bayly, Local Roots of Indian Politics, exemplifies this approach.

33. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–8; for the quote below, 3.

34. Gyanendra Pandey, “Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919–22,” in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies, 1:147–48, 168–71. The subaltern approach, grounded in a Marxist-Gramscian historical framework, can obscure the sampraday that is implicit to most sadhus and therefore overlook the subtle yet important religious and political meanings in the history of Indian political consciousness. Here, for example, Pandey tantalizes the reader with fragments of information regarding the religious context out of which Baba Ramchandra emerged, and then dismisses that context as “the hold of religious symbols on the mind of the peasant” (171) before returning to the more urgent questions of agrarian exploitation, peasant violence, Congress elitism, and colonial manipulation. A similar approach can be discerned in Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 18, who sees religion as an ideological force that sustains the negative self-image of the peasant “by extolling the virtues of loyalty and devotion, so that he could be induced to look upon his subservience not only as tolerable but almost covetable.” See also Guha’s discussion of the springtime festival of Holi, 33–36 and passim.

35. This has been elaborated by Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 374–78. In a rich discussion of peasant mobilization in Awadh that in many ways presaged Pandey’s work, Majid Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest in Northern India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978), 113, observed that Baba Ramchandra’s popular appeal was derived in large part from the fact that he carried a copy of the Tulsidas Ramayana on his back and was able to recite from it with considerable force; this point is pursued in greater detail in Kapil Kumar, “The Ramacharitamanas as a Radical Text: Baba Ram Chandra in Oudh, 1920–1950,” in Sudhir Chandra, ed., Social Transformation and Creative Imagination (New Delhi: Allied, 1984).

36. Noted in Pandey, “Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism,” 167–68. See also Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest, 110, 117.

37. Collective Action and Community. Freitag argues that communalism is the result of a combination of historical developments, beginning in the nineteenth century with a gradual state withdrawal from involvement in important urban public occasions, such as religious festivals, in favor of a new brand of imperial assemblage wherein large landholders—deemed the “natural” leaders of British India—ritually subordinated themselves to the British monarch. This colonial withdrawal from the popular stage afforded local urban notables, themselves prohibited from participation in imperial politics, a public arena in which status could be expressed and confirmed. With the rise of nationalist sentiment in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, the same local notables would gradually reshape the public arena to accommodate an Indian version of nation. As the public arena became nationalized, the national need for an “other” against which to measure itself was projected onto the public arena as communal antagonism. Communalism represented, then, a necessary evil that colonial, nationalist India had to internalize as part of the process of becoming an independent nation-state.

38. Ibid., 16. A danger of the focus on crowd behavior as text (an approach that the subaltern collective shares) is that people are defined not by what they believe, think, say, and write, nor by the alliegances they claim, but solely by what they do. In order to exist for the historian they must act collectively against an other; when they are quiescent, or even when they work toward a goal that engages no immediate and vociferous opposition, they escape notice. When they riot, they accommodate themselves to the logistical needs of a public arena that make no room for complex identities. See Freitag, Collective Action and Community, 239–41; and Sumit Sarkar, “The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to Non-Co-operation, c. 1905–22,” Subaltern Studies, 3:273–74.

39. Freitag, Collective Action and Community, 199–209.

40. Ibid., 28–31; and Richard Schechner and Linda Hess, “The Ramlila of Ramnagar,” Drama Review 21, no. 3 (1977).

41. See also in this context Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text, chapters 5 and 6.

42. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 7. The ramifications of the colonial kshatriya ideal included the ideological evolution of an Indian Homo militaris, bred to serve in the ranks of the British Indian army. See Richard Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), esp. 27–51, 140–59. The “search for martial Indianness” also bred anti-imperial ideologies, such as the “immensely courageous but ineffective terrorism of Bengal, Maharashtra and Panjab led by semi-Westernized, middle-class, urban youth” (Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 7).

43. A. Appadurai, “Is Homo Hierarchicus?” American Ethnologist 13, no. 4 (November 1986): 748–49. See also Nandy, Intimate Enemy, 31–32.

44. Imtiaz Ahmad, “Caste Mobility Movements in North India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 7, no. 2 (1971): 164–91; and Lucy Carroll, “Colonial Perceptions of Indian Society and the Emergence of Caste Associations,” Journal of Asian Studies 37, no. 2 (1978): 233–50. These studies are not concerned with monastic society, as such. See chapter 4 for a lengthier discussion of the arguments forwarded in these essays.

45. See Nicholas B. Dirks, “Castes of Mind,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 56–78; and Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 224–54. Both Dirks and Cohn note the distinction between a colonial discourse of caste and Indian conceptions of social relations. For useful clues to the social and ethnohistorical ramifications of both, see Christopher A. Bayly, “Peasant and Brahmin: Consolidating Traditional Society,” chapter 5 of Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 155–68; and Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

46. For an introduction to these disagreements, see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus? The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Appadurai, “Is Homo Hierarchicus?”

47. See The Laws of Manu, introduction and notes by Wendy Doniger, trans. Doniger and Brian K. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1991), 6 (Manusmriti I.31). According to Doniger, this myth appears in the much earlier Rg Veda10.90. As for structural interpretations of this hierarchy, see Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus 67–68, and on caste and varna, 72–75; and Edmund Leach, “Caste, Class and Slavery: The Taxonomic Problem,” in Anthony de Reuck and Julie Knight, eds., Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 10–11.

48. This is evident in the fact that shudras have aspired successfully to kingship and have manipulated genealogies to provide themselves with “acceptable” kshatriya antecedents. See Romila Thapar, “Genealogy as a Source of Social History,” Indian Historical Review 2, no. 2 (January 1976): 259–81; and “Society and Historical Consciousness: The Itihasa-Purana Tradition,” in S. Bhattacharya and R. Thapar, eds., Situating Indian History for Sarvepalli Gopal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 353–83. The fabrication of kshatriya genealogies is not a universal impulse throughout the subcontinent, however; of particular note are the Nayaka kings of Tamilnadu who were said to have glorified their shudra origins. See V. Narayana Rao, D. Shulman, and S. Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). I am grateful to Dr. Sandria Freitag for bringing this reference to my attention.

49. Marc Galanter has argued that the term “untouchability” was first used by the Maharaja of Baroda in 1909. See his “The Abolition of Disabilities—Untouchability and the Law,” in J. Michael Mahar, ed., The Untouchables in Contemporary India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972), 243, 298. On “dasyu” and “dasa,” see Romila Thapar, “The Image of the Barbarian in Early India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, no. 4 (1971): 408–36; reprinted in Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History, 2d ed. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1984), 152–92. On the problem of nonpejorative terms, see R. S. Khare, The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology, Identity, and Pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. 154; for the definition of “achhut” as contrived by an untouchable ascetic, see 83–84.

50. See R. S. Khare, “The One and the Many: Varna and Jati as a Symbolic Classification,” in Sylvia Vatuk, ed., American Studies in the Anthropology of India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), 35–61; and S. J. Tambiah, “From Varna to Caste through Mixed Unions,” in Jack Goody, ed., The Character of Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 191–229.

51. Dirks’s history of the colonial sociology of knowledge in “Castes of Mind” is of particular value here.

52. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Said was less concerned with India than with the Middle East and paid less attention to history than hermeneutics. See David Kopf, “Hermeneutics versus History,” Journal of Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (May 1980): 495–506.

53. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, xii.

54. Dirks, “Castes of Mind,” 74.

55. See Heinrich von Stietencron, “Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term,” in Gunther D. Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke, eds., Hinduism Reconsidered (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 11–13.